To Partition, or not to Partition?

Excuse my ignorance, but what is the point of partitioning a hard drive? I want to do a clean re-installation on a HP Pavilion zd8205 Notebook PC (XP SP2) and directions show that a decision has to be made about how to partition the HD - how many partitions, how big etc.

Would it be inadvisable just to leave the HD unpartitioned? Thanks.

 

Partitioning used to be useful because it meant smaller cluster sizes. Under the FAT file system, cluster sizes grew with the size of the partition. Example: you have a 17K file and your cluster size is 16K. Of the 17K, 16K fill one cluster, and the extra 1 K goes, all by itself, into another 16K cluster, where no other data can be written. Net effect? 15K wasted space. Over time, you can see how wastefull this might be. Dividing the drive into smaller partitions resulted in smaller clusters, and therefore less wasted space.

Today, with NTFS, partitioning is mainly for organizational purposes. It may also be of use to create a partition where not much besides your OS resides. In the event of a corruption of one partition's file table, other partitions may remain unaffected.

 

For XP use the NTFS file system

You can have up to 4 Primary Partitions per HDD
Each Primary partition can have or support an Operating System or be used as Storage
The size of your partitions is up to you & the size of your HDD

Multiple partitions are great for dual booting / running more than one OS

I recommend at least two Partitions, one for the OS & one for storage
I would never go less than 15gb for an OS but thats my personal preferance

 

I make partitions for organizing my stuff but more importantly for me is if my OS install goes kablooey for whatever reason, I don't lose everything. I install my apps to a different partition along with my documents folder etc. to another partition. I haven't lost a single byte in five years. Of course this doesn't mean one doesn't have to do backups. HTH

 

OK, I'm getting the drift here, thanks - OS in one partition, all else in onother.

There are two Recovery Discs - OS on one and Application and Driver Recovery on another. The first should be installed in the first partition, and the second, and anything else I ever install subsequently, on the second?

 

I think you are possibly thinking of the diagnostic partitions brand name computer manufacturers often put on hard drives of machines they build, and which are accessed by pressing a function key early in the boot-up process. My Dell, for example, has a 39MB FAT partition containing 8MB or so of diagnostic tools, even though the system partition (my C: drive) is formatted NTFS. Creating a similar diagnostic partition on your system to house your recovery stuff may prove challenging, if not impossible.

 

Thanks Doug. Now my tiny brain is totally confused.

 

Yes on the first disk. As far as the second, it's going to depend on whether it'll let you install whatever applications it contains on a different partition. The drivers it'll have to install on the first partition, as that's where the windows systems folders reside. But basicallyanything you might download from the 'net & install could be onto the second partition. As well you can save whatever documents, pictures, zipped programs you want to keep, etc on the second partition.

Todd

 

Doofus, I use partitions to separate large personal files from the files necessary to run my computer. I do this in case something goes wrong with the Operating System partition and it has to be reformatted(erase/lose everything) to get it working again.

You have an 80gb harddrive. 20gb is plenty for the Windows partition to run all programs and both your install discs. This will only take up about 4gb actually but you want a large buffer. You could then create a couple of other partitions in the remaining 60gb and store music, movies, pictures on them. This way if your computer doesn't start one day the music etc. is separate from the OS and can be recovered even if you have to reload Windows. This is what I do, anyway.

 

Here is not bad series of articles about partitioning.

Some statements may be debatable but personnally I prefer to partition my drive and main reasons are:

1) I prefer having 2 partitions: system and data partitions. If my system crashes I want not to lose my data. Although I use backup software, I want to have one more degree of freedom in the form of separate partition.

2) If the drive crashes, it's better to have one small broken partition instead of the the whole drive

3) small partitions are more convenient for backing up